"I was always called 'hey big guy,'" Warren Thompson said. "I played basketball in high school, the big center they would always go to."

Thompson, 21, said he's always been heavy despite being active and eating right.

"I was almost thinking maybe I'm just supposed to be big," Thompson said.

That is until a friend told him about Dr. Sanford Siegal’s Cookie Diet.

"A cookie I can eat all day? Sign me up,” Thompson said.

In three months this Collins College student lost 73 pounds. Thompson ate a cookie every two hours, then a dinner of lean meat and veggies. He said the cookies did stave off the hunger pains.

“I'm not hungry, but I'm not full,” Thompson said. “So there’s no reason for me to eat right now.”

Of course, I couldn’t do a cookie story without trying one.

They're a little dry. They're not Mrs. Fields, but they're not bad.

At 90 calories a cookie, I didn't feel too guilty. It’s diet food. Invented by Siegal, a Miami obesity doctor, I caught up with him during his recent trip to the Valley to find out what exactly is in these alleged weight-loss wonders.

"It’s a particular mixture of amino acids that are protein substances that are very well known as hunger controlling," Siegal said. "To my knowledge no one has ever created a food for the purpose of controlling hunger."

And they’re not new. Siegal’s cookies have just recently been made available here in the Valley, but not without criticism from nutritionists and doctors who say the healthiest way to lose weight is eating small amounts of lean meat, veggies and fruits, not eating just cookies all day.

"We’ve been doing this for 33 years and we’ve had over a half million people who have lost weight," Siegal said. "It doesn’t really matter how silly it sounds, it’s a diet that works."

It worked for Thompson, who has been maintaining his weight for three months now and doesn’t plan on looking back.

"When I look at them [photos] now, I'm like wow, I feel like that guy was my big brother who could beat me up, you know?" Thompson said. "It’s just a matter of looking at those photos and saying I don’t want to be that person ever again."